For those feeling guilty about being a part of "Western imperialism", you might be interested in learning that your guilt is misplaced and the hatred aimed at you by Islamic fundamentalists has nothing to do with to do with post-colonialism and everything to do with the inherent militance of Islam. In a recently published book Islamic Imperialism a History by Efraim Karsch, head of the Mediterranean Studies Programme, King's College, University of London, the author offers an alternative, if not heretical viewpoint on the rise of Islamic imperialism.
Co-incidentally the Center for Religious Freedom, a division of Freedom House, a non-government organization based in the U.S., published "The Saudi Report", a 39-page document that seems to bear out Prof. Karsch's thesis. The Report documents what children in Saudi arabia are taught through their state-sponsored educational system and the evidence is chilling. (for a look at the complete report visit www.freedomhouse.org/religion/)
Here is an assortment of the Islamic teachings spoon fed to Saudi children on a daily basis:
• "Every religion other than Islam is false"
• "Hate the polytheists and infidels"
• "It is forbidden for a Muslim to be a loyal friend to someone who does not believe in God" (allah)
• "Someone who opposes God, even if he is your brother by family, is your enemy"
• "Just as Muslims were successful in the past when they came together...to evict the Christian crusaders from Palestine, so will the arabs and Muslims emerge victorious against the Jews and their allies"
• "The Prophet said, The hour of judgment will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them"
• "The Jews and Christians are enemies of the believers"
• "The blood money for a Muslim woman is half of the blood money for a male Muslim"
I'm sure the latter is going to be very popular with our feminists, who seem much more concerned with their right to abort children at any point during pregnancy than with the rights of their sisters living under the yoke of a belligerent partriarchal religion.
The belief that the West has been the main evildoer throughout history is incorrect as as well as academically unsound, as the facts belie conventional belief. Islamic history, as seen from a current Western point of view is driven by politically correct orthodoxy, rather than the truth. The end result is that by not holding individuals and societies accountable for their actions, we deny that they have the dignity and power to determine their own future. This was a view very much in vogue during the time of T.E. Lawrence who proclaimed the arabs to be"a limited, narrow-minded people, whose inert intellect lay fallow in incurious resignation."
Islam was founded in 622 CE and within twenty years of its founding it began to establish an empire with the conquest of Persia and later the conquest of what is now Pakistan. The Islamic empire gradually spread to the point where it covered a substantial portion of the known world, including a large part of Europe. These actions did not come about as a result of "Western imperialsim", but they stemmed from a desire to dominate, a desire that remains to this day
In the words of Shelby Steele, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution specializing in the study of racism and multiculturalsim "Islamic extremism is one of the most pernicious forms of evil opportunism that has ever existed, we have felt compelled to fight it with an almost managerial minimalism that shows us to be beyond the passions of war--and thus well dissociated from the avariciousness of the white supremacist past."
It is time we saw Islamic extremism for what it really is: a system of belief as morally reprehensible as that of fascism, communism or national socialism. and the sooner we mobilize all our resources to defeat this evil the better.
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